Helldivers 2 requires a PSN account to play, and players aren’t happy.
Steam are now refunding Helldivers to 2 players after Sony and Arrowhead told PC players that they must link a PSN account if they want to continue playing. Despite having over 90 hours recorded, one player managed to get a refund through Steam with a message that states, “Sony has retroactively changed how the game works and forced legal agreements upon me, I do not accept”. Following this, Helldivers 2 has been removed from Steam in over 177 countries where PSN is not available.
Arrowhead first said that linking accounts was an optional feature because of technical issues when Helldivers 2 was released in February. However, on Friday, Sony announced that Steam players will soon be required to link a PlayStation account to play the game. Since then, the game has received over 200,000 negative reviews from players on Steam.
Arrowhead CEO and Helldivers 2 creator, Joan Pilestedt, claims that he also has a role in the confusion, as he states that the studio isn’t in control of selling the game and wouldn’t know how players can’t make PSN accounts in different parts of the world.
Pilestedt confirms that he is partially to blame as he decided to turn off account linking at launch so people could play the game, but he did not ensure that players knew about the requirement, and he didn’t talk about it enough. He states that the studio knew about this for about 6 months before launch that this would be mandatory for online PS titles.
Pilestedt states that the team was still talking about solutions with PlayStation, especially for countries that don’t have PSN. He also states that while he does not have the final say, he hears players’ complaints and he is doing everything he can to speak for the community.
